SWITZERLAND
April 16, 2006
Expansion Plans Not True Says Minelli
Ludwig A. Minelli, Secretary General of DIGNITAS
in Switzerland, said that a report of the Sunday Times of 16 April
2006 telling that DIGNITAS has plans "to open a chain of
high street-style centres" to end the lives of people with
illnesses or mental conditions such as chronic depression "is
a hoax".
Daniel Foggo, the author of the misleading article, has never
spoken to Minelli, and Minelli classifies him as one of those
journalists of which George Bernard Shaw had written (in his play
'The Doctor's Dilemma' in 1904): "Walpole returns with The
Newspaper Man, a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for
ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which
renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees,
or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As
the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism
(for a newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports,
but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but
honour to lose by inaccuracy and inveracity), he has perforce
become a journalist, and has
to keep up an air of high spirits through a daily struggle with
his own illiteracy and the precariousness of his employment. He
has a note-book, and occasionally attempts to make a note; but
as he cannot write short-hand , and does not write with ease in
any hand, he generally gives it up as a bad job before he succeeds
in finishing a sentence."
In order to make the situation clear, Minelli is answering further
questions of British journalists whether he will expand DIGNITAS
to Great Britain, that this are in fact his plans, and that he
will buy the House of Parliaments and Downing Street 10 in order
to install there a clinic which would accept also the horses and
dogs of her majesty... And he is just awaiting the answer: "I
didn't know that they are for sale"
Minelli, who has been for eleven years the first Swiss correspondent
of the German News Magazine "Der Spiegel", said that
in British newspapers, only very rarely reports on DIGNITAS are
accurate.
"First, they all have some phantasies about a 'clinic',
whilst DIGNITAS has no clinic at all but a very modest 1-1/2-room-apartment.
Second, they always invent hoaxes in order to sell their product
by swindling their readers. Whole British press seems to be a
mere bullshit industry."
Minelli is also severely critisizing an article of Jocasta Shakespeare
in the Sunday Times Magazine of the same date: "The lady
has not been able to understand differentiated facts. Just one
example: She is falsely pretending that I would have said that
patients with Alzheimer's disease do have lucent intervalls which
would enable them to have an assisted suicide in Switzerland.
I have told her that persons with Alzheimer's disease not wanting
to make a full Alzheimer's career will have to chose a premature
assisted suicide due to the fact that as long as euthanasia is
not possible, they will have to make their decision long before
they lose the capacity of discernment, and this is possible only
in an early stadium of the illness. But this is yet too complicated
to be understood by British journalists."
Therefore, Minelli gives the advice never to say that he would
have said something even if it has been reported in a British
newspaper as a quote. "You never may trust them; forget them!"
Another article on Dignitas
Read euthanasia news and developments
from
